PLAYING WITH CRYSTALS

While Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk fights
valiantly on the front and the Čapek brothers
come up with the word ‘robot’, young Czech
architects rework Cubist ideas in the world
of design, creating a streetlamp like a modern
Marian column, a sculptural bookcase like
a piece of origami, and a unique box shaped
like a crystal.

Prague artists meet in new cafés.

1910 Engineer Jan Kašpar makes the first
flight in this country, in a machine he built himself. Czech painters discover Pablo
Picasso. The Club for Old Prague, run by the architects Pavel Janák, Josef Gočár,
Josef Chochol and Vlastislav Hofman, supervises new buildings in the city centre,
creating an opportunity for Czech Cubism.

1911 Adolf Loos gives a lecture in
Prague on the theme ‘Ornament is a Crime’. Adherents of Cubism found the Group
of Artists. A year later, two of its members, Josef Gočár and Pavel Janák, found the
Prague Art Workshops, which manufacture Cubist designs, alongside the Artěl
cooperative. The carmaker Praga dominates the Austro-Hungarian market. Albert
Einstein works in Prague as a professor of physics.

1912 Josef Gočár builds the
Cubist House at the Black Madonna. Viktor Kaplan patents his turbine.